Idle/Random/whatever Thoughts of a Demented/Idle/Whatever Mind

1. Researchers plan to retract landmark Alzheimer’s paper containing doctored images : Researchers are planning to retract a landmark Alzheimer's paper due to manipulated data. The study investigated the impact of a specific protein on memory in mice. The findings suggested that the protein caused memory impairment. However, it was later revealed that the researchers had altered the data, leading to the retraction of the paper. While some scientists believe the amyloid beta hypothesis remains important for Alzheimer's research, others argue otherwise. My Take: It is definitely a black mark on the peer review process for having been duped that long, but I definitely feel that though late it did find the faults and forced to get a retraction on the paper. Often there are researchers who are under undue pressure, no different than engineers working on startups to come up with something. But I guess we as a society fail to acknowledge that finding out that something does n...

A few interesting things I learnt about this week are 1. Coffee Stains in LaTeX - This package provides an essential feature that LaTeX has been missing for too long: It adds coffee stains to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding them manually. My Take: There is too much fun to be had with LaTeX. I guess the rest of the world missed this wonderful piece of tech completely. These small and sometimes pointless tools are what really make any technology platform stand out among others, not because of the tech but the fact that its users are emotionally invested to build these kind of tech nuggets 2. Meshtastic - Meshtastic is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source. LoRa uses license-free sub-gigahertz radio frequency bands EU868 (863–87...